Despite allegations of serious abuse in immigration detention centers, the UK
persisted in not imposing a maximum time limit for immigration detention, and
continued to detain asylum-seeking and migrant children.

This is from the January 2018 report (pdf) from the Human Rights Watch (HRW). World Report 2018 is their 28th annual review of human rights
practices around the globe.

The report summarises key human rights issues in more than 90 countries and territories worldwide, drawing on events from late 2016 through November 2017.

The report finds:

Germany over the past year made headlines when the Alternative for Germany (AfD) became the first far-right party to enter its parliament in decades
Despite a strong tradition of protecting civil and political rights, Australia has serious unresolved human rights problems. Australia continued in 2017 to hold asylum seekers who arrived by boat on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea and on the island nation of Nauru, where conditions are abysmal
Bahrain’s human rights situation continued to worsen in 2017. Authorities shut down the country’s only independent newspaper and the leading secular-left opposition political society.
In Bangladesh, civil society groups faced pressure from both state and non-state actors, including death threats and attacks from extremist groups.

Date: 19 March and 23 April 2018
Location: Centre for Life, Times Square, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 4EP
Cost: Free with a £50 refundable deposit

Want help using equality and human rights to achieve your organisation’s core purpose?

We have launched our Equality and Human Rights Framework – a free digital toolkit for voluntary and community sector organisations.

We’re looking for organisations in the North East to register for our Framework learning programme. This free series of workshops will explore how to use the Framework to integrate equality and human rights into your work.

The deadline for registration is 12 March 2018.

Here’s the timetable for the learning programme (pdf). We’ll cover:

How the framework works in practice
The rights in the Equality Act 2010 and Human Rights Act 1998 that can help our sector
Your own experiences with equality and human rights…along with time for refreshments and networking.
This learning programme is free but to confirm your place we need a refundable deposit of £50. This deposit will be repaid once you have completed the learning programme.

We want the widest possible range of community groups and voluntary organisations to attend – no matter what your size, or level of experience, is.

In return, we ask that you commit to:

Completing the full day workshop on the learning programme on 19 March
Participating in one or both of the half day workshops on 23 April 2018
Providing a pre-evaluation form (March) and a follow-up survey (September) as part of our evaluation programme.
We expect this programme to be popular and so confirmation of participation will be made on a rolling basis, ending 12 March 2018.

Register for the learning programme in Newcastle upon Tyne.

The venue is fully accessible for wheelchair users and has induction loops.

‘In a democratic society, the press must be accountable for stirring up hate’.

This is according to Rachel Elgy who has launched a January 2018 Crowdjustice campaign to hold the press to account for hate speech and challenge ineffective press regulation.

As a result of submitting a complaint in August 2017 to the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) against an Islamophobic article in The Sun, Rachel is now challenging the IPSO decision that the complaint would not be upheld. Trevor Kavanagh, who wrote the article, was at the time a member of IPSO’s board.

Rachel is being represented by John Halford at Bindmans LLP to take it forward to a judicial review and she is running a crowdfunding campaign to raise the fees.

Rachel states:

I may be the one taking on the review, but this is not about me, or indeed for my benefit. It’s to try and make some difference to the barrage of hate that we constantly see in national press, it’s to demonstrate that we do not accept and validate hate speech, and it’s to demand that freedom of speech is protected, but so are our other human rights: to live in safety and dignity, free from discrimination with freedom of religious belief.

Date: 19 February 2018 Location: NCVO, 8 All Saints St, London N1 9RL Cost: Free Do you want to help improve the quality and quantity of discrimination advice in welfare benefits? We’ve just launched the Everyday Equality Project (pdf), funded by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. This project will create a practical online handbook, showing …